On April 24, 2007, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine announced that his State Legislature may not have to take action to correct the systemic flaw that allowed Seung Hui Cho to purchase his firearms. Kaine believes that an executive order could close the loophole by requiring Virginia to transmit mental health data to the Instant Check database.

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday that he is considering an executive order to make sure that gun sellers have more information about the mental health of potential buyers, a move that would have kept Seung Hui Cho from purchasing the handguns he used to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech last week.

A court had found Cho to be dangerously mentally ill, but that information was not available in the computer systems used by the outlets that sold Cho the guns. Kaine’s proposal would ensure that such mental health information be in the database.

“I think there’s a way to tighten this and to get more data onto the system,” Kaine (D) said. If that data had been available at the gun stores, Cho, who killed himself after the rampage April 16, would have been barred by federal law from buying the weapons.

Traditionally “pro-gun� legislators are agreeing that the laws already on the books might have prevented Cho from arming himself. In essence, they’re supporting the argument that gun control works, and that gun-control laws, effectively administered, might have prevented the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

So now we know at least one thing Governor Kaine is going to do about gun violence. And we know that it’s a common-sense, correct thing to do. But it’s also popular and politically safe. We need other elected leaders to follow Governor Kaine’s example. They need to realize that taking steps to prevent gun violence need not be controversial.

Those opposing any and all laws restricting access to guns are quickly marginalized once people see the consequences of letting guns fall so easily into the hands of criminals and dangerously unbalanced individuals like Seung Hui Cho.

(Note to readers: This blog entry, as well as past blog entries, are co-posted on www.bradycampaign.org/blog and www.huffingtonpost.com)

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech, and with the families who have lost loved ones and been forced to endure such a terrible loss. 32 dead, and 15 wounded - the worst single mass shooting in U.S. history.

It has been eight years this week since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. It has been two years since ten people were killed at Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. Six months ago, a lone gunman shot and killed all five female students at an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

In the coming weeks, even more details will emerge about the Virginia Tech shooter and how our weak gun laws allowed him to arm himself. Pundits and politicians will offer condolences, caution against hasty action, and try to understand the pathology of the shooter.

Instead of focusing only on the one incident, we all need to look toward the future and ask:

What are we going to do about this?

It’s long past time to have a serious national conversation about gun violence. It’s past time for us to agree that something is wrong when an individual with such obvious signs of instability can legally arm himself with the extraordinary firepower necessary to murder so many innocent people. Something is wrong when thirty-two people die from gun violence inflicted by others, not just at Virginia Tech on April 16, but every day in this country. Obviously, what we’re doing now is not working.

Some people don’t want to have this conversation. They’re content to repeat platitudes, make excuses, nitpick proposals, and postpone taking action. They accuse the rest of us of “politicizing� the issue, while they hide behind the gun lobby’s talking points.

The first comments from President Bush, through a spokeswoman, were that he “believes that there is a right for people to bear arms,� but then later said that now was not an appropriate time to discuss policy. If not now, when is it time?

It is not “politicizing� the tragedy to ask what we can do to make ourselves and our families safe from gun violence. When politicians and pundits deny that a problem exists and that is susceptible to policy revisions and cling to their ideological fenceposts instead of coming to the table with honest ideas, it is they who must stop the political posturing. They have to ask themselves how they can help keep our communities and our schools safe.

We have to insist that they respond when we ask them, “What are you going to do about this?�

(Note to readers: This blog entry, as well as past blog entries, are co-posted on www.bradycampaign.org/blog and www.huffingtonpost.com)

If more guns made us all safer, you’d think a police station would be one of the safest places in which to work. After all, people not only carry guns, but they regularly train to keep their shooting skills at top levels. These are people who know guns, know what they’re doing, and are taught to anticipate trouble.

This all proved to be of no help to the two Fairfax County, Virginia police officers who were killed at their police station on May 8, 2006 by Michael Kennedy. I mentioned this incident in my December 21, 2006 blog entry. A front page story in The Washington Post today (April 6, 2007) gives more information on what happened before May 8th that helped lead to this tragedy.

A new 21-page Federal indictment charging the shooter’s father describes a house where there were at least “20 guns, including assault rifles, a semiautomatic shotgun, two semiautomatic rifles, bolt-action shotguns and semiautomatic pistols� along with “more than 2,500 round of ammunition.�

The 18-year old shooter, who used his father’s 9mm semiautomatic pistol to shoot the family dog in February 2006, is described as “having a penchant for assault rifles� and posing for a picture with friends “holding an AK-47.� After Michael Kennedy’s mother signed a waiver allowing her then-minor son to fire assault rifles at a shooting range, less than two weeks later his father bought an AK-47 that Michael considered to be “his gun.� This was one of the guns Michael Kennedy took with him to the Fairfax County police station.

One of the negative responses to my April 3, 2007 blog by “Afrikaner” (comment #29) suggested that people should “…pull out your favorite assault rifle and give it a hug. It will make you feel better.â€�

When are we going to realize that “a penchant for assault rifles� can easily lead to violence, and that a well-armed workplace can’t prevent deadly violence from happening? Strong sensible laws making these weapons less easily available to people like Michael Kennedy and his father would help prevent deaths and injuries.

This week, for two days in a row, we saw high-profile killings of women by former boyfriends. On Monday, a University of Washington researcher was shot to death in her office by a man who then killed himself. On Tuesday, a hotel worker was killed at the CNN Center in Atlanta.While statistics show that women are less likely to be murdered than men (“females accounted for 24% of total homicides in 2000â€�¹) their killer is much more likely to be a spouse or intimate acquaintance (“almost halfâ€�¹) than a stranger. According to Susan Sorenson, School of Public Health, UCLA, “intimate partner homicides composed only 4% of the murders of men but about one-third of the murders of women.â€�²

Rather than focus on the challenges of domestic abuse or the problems that occur when someone in a bad relationship can easily get a gun, columnist Bob Allen on Wednesday decided that the blame for tragedies like these should be placed on people who “cannot carry a weapon… without asking permission of the government.� In describing the murder of Clara Riddle in Atlanta, rather than blame the shooter, Allen quickly found a different culprit: an unarmed witness:

Clara’s tormentor ordered Charles out of the way, and instead of standing his ground to defend an obviously distressed woman, he obeyed the thug’s order and let them pass.

Charles’ choice was to go in search of a guard instead of personally coming to the woman’s aid, and the tragic result is that Clara is now dead.

Allen ignores the fact that an armed security guard responded immediately. But, to the gun pushers, every crime, every accident, every tragic incident that happens in America could somehow have been made less deadly by adding even more guns to the mix. In their rhetoric, a gun is a magical shield that never fails to protect the innocent, and always brings down the bad guy. The reality is much more complicated, but subtleties do not advance an ideology.

Guns do not instantly and always make people safe. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible at best. And to suggest that Charles Williams – whose only alleged failing was that he did not carry a gun – has some moral responsibility for the death of Clara Riddles is simply unconscionable.

FOOTNOTES
1. Private Guns, Public Health, David Hemenway, p.122.
2. Evaluation Review, V.30 N.3, June 2006, Special Issue: Intimate Partner Violence and Firearms, Susan B. Sorenson ed.

(Note to readers: This blog entry, as well as past blog entries, are co-posted on www.bradycampaign.org/blog and www.huffingtonpost.com)

The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune has done some excellent reporting on the effects of Minnesota’s liberalized concealed-carry law passed in 2003. Contrary to the claims of gun-rights advocates, the findings indicate that more guns do not equal less crime.

“There was an awful lot of hype on both sides before the law passed,” said state Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion. “It just hasn’t materialized. I never believed there’d be a decrease in crime because people carry guns.”

The Star Tribune’s editorial board followed by calling the liberalized concealed-carry law “a solution in search of a problem� and pointed out that the NRA and other gun-industry lobbying groups use such bills as a way to raise money and sell their ideas, with little regard for how things really work.

There is a lesson here for Minnesota: Refuse to play the NRA game. The NRA has, in fact, a new flavor-of-the-month law before the Legislature right now…

Minnesotans need to be smarter about dealing with the NRA and legislators who sign on to push its bills. The group will never run out of proposals, because that’s how it survives.

The gun pushers try to create demand for their product, and they do it by fabricating nightmare scenarios that (they claim) can be addressed with the firearms they have for sale. Minnesotans and the rest of us would be wise to treat their “solutions� with skepticism.